Plurk - Our Philosophy in a Walnut Shell
May 30, 2008
Briefly after launching Plurk, we carefully thought about what the essence of Plurk was. Why do we create what we create? What prompted the need for Plurk? How do we take our collective and shared values and experiences and bring them into the application that you see on this site? After deliberating long and hard, we were able to distil our values and vision for Plurk into 4 overriding mantras.
The 4 Tenets of Plurk and the A-Team (ahem, this is us)
1. Look beyond the periphery - Think Global, Act….Global
Hailing originally from 5 countries, 3 continents, and collectively fluent in at least 10 different languages, we’re cognizant of the values of looking at things from a variety of perspectives. The confluence and blend of a cross section of diverse cultures and growth/learning experiences allows us to avoid the sort of localized myopia that is often seen pervading many new Internet applications these days. Of course, these collective differences mean that we fight, we bicker, and we disagree, all the time in fact, but we tend to do so with reason. And that reason is that we are passionate about creating the best web applications for the mass of people the world over. Conversely, we try not to subvert ourselves to any pervading groupthink. There’ll always be transient noise and riff-raff on the web, periods of ramp up and periods of glut, distorting the harmony and meaningful possibilities the web was originally intended for. We don’t focus on the short-term or the short-sighted. We’ll always be looking beyond the 100th window.
2. Go beyond FUBU.
No, by FUBU we’re not referring to the urban clothing company. Cop their apparel for all we care. What we are talking about is the idea of a ‘for us, by us’ mentality and this largely ties into our first tenet. The web is aglow with ever new applications bursting at the seams with wondrous displays of technical and visual mastery on the part of brilliant developers and design architects. The problem however is that most of these applications continue to be developed for the same narrow group of highly technical, always wired, power users. We ask ourselves, how many more social bookmarkers, task management applications, content management systems and rss readers does the world really need? These are things which don’t register on the palette of REAL web users. We desired to create an application with low barriers to entry for REAL people; people who’ve likely never been exposed to buzzwords like rss, ajax, or podcast. Don’t get us wrong, we love to eat our own dogfood, but we put real effort to ensure that our dogfood tastes good to all breeds of dogs around the world, and not just some small band of cliquish poodles who gather for crumpets every afternoon while sipping on their macchiatos and waxing philosophical on things that don’t matter.
3. A passion to push the envelope — the money never matters
It’s about identifying unmet needs and working passionately toward change. The same mantra which led us to develop the first user generated free video hosting community on the Internet 24 months before there was ever a Youtube. Plurk has not been created by dozens of people quickly assembled together to work on it and push it out per the demands of venture capitalists or bankers looking for a quick cashout. Rather we are a close-knit and agile team of some of the most consummate and hard working young web pioneers (developers, architects, interface designers, security experts) out there who have serendipitously come together guided by a vision to always create change and push the envelope of what should be possible on the web. All guts, no glory, as they say, but of course the limelight never mattered. We create because we are artists.
4. Simplify.
We hate clutter; emotional, physical, on the web, or otherwise. We absolutely hate it. Why unnecessarily complicate things or aggravate your users? We take solace in striving towards beautiful simplicity. Google, now that’s simple. The same text box which has stared us gleefully in the face now for over a decade. We ascribe to the same notion–that all levels of complexity should be hidden from our user as much as possible. Of course, behind every corner, you’ll find shiny new goodies which will only make your Plurk experience that much more enjoyable but we want to ensure that the basic premise of the application is something that ANY user, whether they’re 13 or 99 years old, will get within mere seconds of visiting and using the site. We don’t want you to have to think too hard about how Plurk works, leave that to us. We just want you to use it.